When I was young I was sent off to various camps on the east
coast and one was Killooleet in Hancock, Vermont. It was run by the brother of my idol Pete Seeger,
the folk singer. It was probably the
only camp I really enjoyed. There was a
lot of freedom with responsibility for the campers and in this story I was a
month shy of my 13th birthday.
I wish I could remember all the details but, alas, I can’t. I do remember falling in love for the first
time. Maybe I shouldn’t even use that
term, but I know I had this great urge to kiss this girl, Ellie, and I finally mustered
up the courage to do so.
My mother died a few years ago and I found all sorts of
interesting souvenirs that she kept and among them I found a plastic barometer
and it rang a bell. I was not sure I
could trust my memory that this was the Bar Mitzvah present that Ellie gave me
a couple of months after we met. I found,
however, my mother’s notebook where she wrote down all my gifts and there it
said, barometer from Elinor Gollay.
There also were letters I had sent home from camp reporting on important
matters such as sitting next to Ellie at the dinner table and other exciting
tidbits. Then back in New York, Ellie
invited me to Broadway theater and I remember seeing West Side Story from the
house seats. My parents usually took me
upstairs somewhere. Now that made an
impression on a 13 year old.
 |
| Bar Mitzvah Barometer |
 |
| Elinor Gollay |
This was not something I obsessed
over but some 50 odd
years later I came across an article in an art blog talking about the modern
collection that was on exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg,
Florida lent by Elinor Gollay and her step mother, Jean. Coincidentally, shortly, before I read the
article, I had been to St. Petersburg, Florida and seen their gem of a museum
and met the curator of the exhibition and chief curator, Jennifer Hardin.
By getting in touch with Jennifer I
found out how to reach Ellie.
She had actually lived in Santa Fe years
ago and still travels back to New Mexico from time to time with her husband to
visit his family. Two
weeks ago Ellie with her spouse and I with mine had lunch together in Bernalillo situated between
Albuquerque and Santa Fe.
All our lives are so much about the
connections we make and the serendipity of life. Ellie’s father’s collection is the hook that
allows me to tell you about my early love life in my Missives from the Art
World. When I met Elinor her parents
were already divorced and all I remember is a reference to her father being a lawyer
for some famous artists.
Benjamin Gollay (1906-1983) was a New York lawyer living in the West Village. He became good friends with, the art critic and champion of
the abstract expressionists Harold Rosenberg (1906-1978) and through him in the
1950’s he met quite a number of members of New York School. He became an avid fan of many, such as Franz Klein, Robert
Motherwell and Elaine and Willem de Kooning.
 |
| "Harold Rosenberg" by Elaine De Kooning See credit line 1, below |
Eventually Gollay bought a house in East Hampton, which was then not the posh location it
is today, but an inexpensive retreat from the city that became a haven for
artists. There he became close personal friends with these not yet household
names. Ellie does not refer to her
father as an art collector because his love was for the artists
themselves. He often did favors for them
in the way of legal services and out of friendship and gratitude they would
bring him examples of their art. Every once in a while he would realize that
one of the artists had fallen on particularly hard times and he would buy a
painting, sometimes without even seeing it before hand.
In 1966 Gollay remarried to Jean
Block. Willem de Kooning inscribed one
of his paintings
from his famous “Woman Series” as a wedding gift and dedicated it "To
Ben and Jean from Bill."
 |
| From "Woman Series" by Willem De Kooning See credit line 2, below |
He never asked for
art and some artists therefore thought that he did not like their work. Such was the case of Franz Klein: when Harold
Rosenberg told Gollay this he went over to Klein’s house the next day and found he had died that
very same day!
In this way he eventually amassed 150 paintings by artists who
are now famous. Truth be told they did
not all become famous, but even works by the lesser-known, such as Norman Bluhm
(1920-1999), are, none-the-less, good representations of the New York School.
 |
| "Untitled" by Norman Bluhm See credit line 3, below |
Benjamin Gollay died in 1983 and the collection was inherited
by his wife and daughter who have
generously lent and made gifts to the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg.
Life has many funny twists and turns and it can be great fun
to follow them. It was so exciting to
see Ellie again, and to learn more about her father’s collection, and that our
paths might have crossed before
here in Santa Fe, or even
where she lives now in Portland, Oregon, where my wife worked for a
decade!
*************************************************
Photo Credit Lines:
By ELAINE DE KOOING, (1918-1989)
Oil on canvas, 1956
National Portrait Gallery,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.
2) NORMAN BLUHM
American, 1920-1999
Untitled, 1974
Acrylic on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Florida
Gift of Elinor Gollay from the Benjamin Gollay Collection
3) WILLEM
DE KOONING
American,
b. the Netherlands (1904–1998)
UNTITLED,
from the WOMAN series, c.1966
Oil
on newspaper mounted on board
Extended
loan to the Museum by Elinor Gollay
from
the Benjamin Gollay Collection
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